


How to Save the World

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, Post-TWS, WWII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-14
Updated: 2016-05-14
Packaged: 2018-06-09 07:54:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6896551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarah Rogers always said that Steve wanted to save the world. Then Steve went to war - twice, once in each century - and things started to change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Save the World

**Author's Note:**

> As always, posted from tumblr under the same name, beta-ed by cabloom. And they were all written pre-CACW, so any resemblance to canon ends with TWS.
> 
> Steve's rather harsh outlook on the military belongs to Steve, who has a canonical tendency to sort of lose it when Bucky is involved, and should not be taken in any broad sense.

Steve didn’t want to kill anyone, before the war.  He wanted to save the world, Sarah used to say, rolling her eyes, and Bucky would mutter that he wanted to break his damn nose, and then Mrs. Rogers would paddle Steve for fighting and Jamie for language.

It wasn’t that no one died, in Brooklyn.  Mike Lonciani fell in with a bad crowd, Mrs. Rogers said, and got gunned down working late in his Pop’s garage.  Kids died every spring, the yellow quarantine mark painted on the door, the apartment empty for a few months because no one wanted to move where the fever had been.

Steve lit candles in church for the dead.  Prayed to St. Stephen for their souls, and kept his commandments.

Then he listened to Col. Phillips’s gravelly voice declaring Barnes, James Buchanan among the lost, and wanted to wrap his hands around the man’s throat just to make him stop.  For an hour—for a plane ride and a reckless fall, for the moments after he opened the prison cells and the captives swore Barnes was dead—Steve wanted to set the world on fire just to feel it burn.

But Bucky couldn’t be dead.  Wasn’t dead.  Bucky was alive, and whole, and everything was fine, better than fine.  Everything was just like it should have been all along, Bucky at his side and permission to save the world.  (This time Steve wouldn’t break his nose.)

You can’t fool fate, Sarah Rogers would say, brushing her thin fingers through Steve’s sweat-damp hair.  You can’t bargain with God.  (Steve had lit candles for the dead, as a child, for his father and all the fathers before.  After Bucky fell, Steve lit sticks of dynamite, and watched the train burn.)

Peggy tried to tell him that it was honorable, to die for one’s country.  That it was honorable, to die for someone you loved.  Steven Grant Rogers had believed this, sitting in an examination room in an enlistment office years before.

_ There are men laying down their lives, Buck. _

It wasn’t true.  There was no honor in killing the best man Steve had ever known.  (There would be no mercy, for any of them.)  There was no glory in the folded flag and the gold star for the window, no recompense from the Sergeant’s medals that Phillips pressed into Captain Rogers’s clenched hands.

* * *

Steve did not bother to choose his battles, in the twenty-first century.  He would not  _ recruit _ like Fury thought that he should, though he would fight.  He would not trick any more boys into believing that they could save the world.  He watched Fury try to explain the missiles, Stark try to explain who had a right to power no one should wield, and thought of Becky Barnes wrinkling her nose and asking who had made Steve the pope.

Then there were helicarriers, and Zola, and it turned out that Steve’s frozen vengeance was still fresh and bleeding.  That he had  _ lost _ , in 1945, but he wouldn’t lose again.

He wouldn’t lose Bucky again.

* * *

“Stark wants to fix the world,” Bucky said, settling onto one side of a couch in a summer home not built for the two feet of snow outside.  “Thought that was everything you ever wanted?”  He raised an eyebrow at Steve and managed not to flip over the sofa when Sam dropped a stack of frying pans and cursed loudly two rooms away, and they would probably all regret that it was his night to cook.

It wasn’t as though Steve was the only one who’d changed.  Steve woke up some mornings wanting the world to burn.  He had woken up before dawn that morning with his face pressed into Bucky’s neck, the tips of his ears cold but the rest of him wondrously warm, and he’d wanted to stay in bed for the next seventy years.  Bucky woke up and catalogued his memories, laid quietly and labeled everything he could sense, see or smell, every place that Steve’s skin touched his.  When they went outside the world was sorted into threats, escape routes, and safe places.

Bucky saw danger.  Steve wasn’t certain what he saw, anymore, besides the gap between Sam’s teeth when he smiled—open despite Riley’s fall and the fact that they were all wanted men—and the way the tension eased in Bucky’s jaw when Steve leaned across the sofa and pulled him in.

“Maybe the best way to fix the world,” Steve mumbled, pressing his face into Bucky’s neck until he couldn’t breathe, “is just to let it be.”

Bucky hummed, sounding unconvinced, and Sam rolled his eyes as he walked in balancing three plates of food on one arm, his other hand curled around the necks of a few beers.  “You want to stop saving people?” Sam asked, looking skeptical when Steve picked up his head to glare.  “Captain America wants to stop saving the world?”

“I want to stop  _ stopping  _ people,” Steve corrected, reaching for a beer.  “And start saving them, instead.”

Sam smiled, gap-toothed and smirking pointedly at Bucky, who huffed and stole Steve’s beer.  “Going to be a hell of a lot harder,” Sam said, “since there’s a couple billion people to one world.”

“Gotta start small,” Steve answered, burrowed into Bucky’s shoulder.  He was completely unprepared for the metal fingers digging into his ribs, Bucky declaring that Steve better think twice about who he was calling  _ small _ .


End file.
